100 VINYLZ: #96 - Run Joe 12-inch by Chuck Brown & The Soul Searchers

(1986, Future Records)
Go-go is a form of music with widespread popularity from the southern part of Maryland all the way down to the northern part of Virginia. At times, something or other will happen to have it hit a peak that spreads it wildly from Philly to Carolina, but that main area with D.C. as the epicenter is it’s homeland. Basically, in case you don’t know, instead of looping break beats like a DJ would do with the rapping musics, go-go has a live band play the loop in smoky drunken manner, with call and response type lyrics, and a tremendously ridiculous percussion section that owes as much to black marching bands and broke ass kids beating on five-gallon buckets as it does to the standard Afro-Spanish jazzy influences you’d expect to read up on in a WaxPoetics article on the subject. Concerts are advertised with large day-glo posters that I used to snag off of abandoned buildings in Shockoe Bottom and cover the walls of my studio room in the shitty Oregon Hill house we lived in when we had our first kid. Lime green and blaze orange backgrounds with black block letters and the faces of Rare Essence or the Junkyard Band or Backyard Band or Northeast Groovers or Chuck Brown staring out.
Chuck Brown has earned the nickname the Godfather of Go-go, and is as famous a D.C. landmark as Ben’s Chili Bowl, guys who used to hang with Rayful Edmonds, or homeless con men with maps waiting for you once you step off the metro at the National Mall. The aforementioned WaxPoetics just had an article on Brown himself, and I learned that he actually spent time living near where I grew up, he in the far end of Charlotte County, Virginia, plus all over southside Virginia he bounced around as a kid. And he maintains his base throughout that region, as he’s usually scheduled to play Brown’s Island free Friday evening shows in Richmond, that standard deal where you can groove and drink overpriced cheap beers using beer tickets, except the Richmond ones tend to have that upwardly mobile black couple demographic covered, which is always fun to soak up. (It’s odd to me how many families like that have weird old sambo advertising art up in their homes, I guess to remember something or other and be thankful, but it’d be kind of like me keeping a framed print of like Junior Samples from Hee Haw in my bathroom… which come to think of it, would be pretty damn pimp.)
Anyway, the past few years I have acquired a decent collection of good to fair go-go singles, mostly happening to catch record stores that have no idea even what the fuck go-go music is. I got a slew of 12-inches, including this one, at a indy record store in Charlottesville in this manner, because the guy just had it all lumped into the soul $1 bin, and when I came up with a stack of T.T.E.D. and Future Records releases, the guy behind the counter (also the owner) was all like, “What is this stuff?” And I had to do the thing where you know what it is but you don’t act like it’s really anything or the fucker would’ve been like, “Okay, let me look these up…” then fucked around in the ebays long enough to charge me five bucks for each shitty, half-scratched 12-inch. And even though “Bustin’ Loose” is probably considered Chuck Brown’s biggest national hit (I remember a black kid telling me in like first grade a joke about how the Incredible Hulk sang “I feel like bustin’ loose! Bustin’ loose!” after busting through a wall, which was hellafied funny when you’re like six seeing who can piss into the urinals the farthest across the room, all geeked up on grape Kool-Aid with like triple the recommended sugar), but “Run Joe” is my favorite go-go single I’ve gotten hold of over the years. Basically, it’s a song (I think it’s actually an older song reworked by Chuck Brown into your standard eight-minute go-go groovefest) about a dude having to bolt out the club because the cops have showed up. It’s also an ironic go-go hit, since Washington D.C. sort of outlawed go-go music at most clubs in the ‘80s because of people getting shot up, although to be fair to go-go music, at that point in D.C.’s history, when crack and crack money were flooding the streets, it was a notoriously insane place and you couldn’t really gather together more than a hundred black people under the age of 25 without expecting somebody to get shot at.
The terrible thing is how screwed music has brainwashed me into loving everything screwed at times, and I had a long kick where I would only buy 12-inch disco singles and play them with the pitch control dragged as slow as it would go. This was when my man Boogie Brown had given me a pair of Numarks to fuck around with, and I was working up some retarded sets. The only two sets I really came up with were a good 25-minute or so redneck hippie funk set, and taking the best breaks from all the immensely shitty disco singles and mixing in some go-go and hard funk shit from the mid-’70s, of course all of it slowed down. I made a couple mixtapes of this, including a spell where the only cassettes I could find were some shitty 60-minute TDKs (I usually only rocked the Maxells - preferably 100-minutes, but of course, I don’t think you have more than one choice most times nowadays for cassettes), and playing “Run Joe”, which usually was towards the front of me making these slowed down disco/go-go mega-mixes, ended up usually running most of the first side of the 60-minute tape, pushing a good 11 minutes when dragged slow. Man, that’s some good shit to get high to. But not crack. Crack doesn’t give you the right mindframe to enjoy that constant go-go percussion, which is probably why there used to be so much violence at go-go shows.

100 VINYLZ: #97 - Steal Your Face 2xLP by The Grateful Dead

(1976, Grateful Dead Records)
The Grateful Dead are kind of like politics in that people who care to have an opinion have a very strong opinion at the far ends of for or against. Plenty folks hate the Dead, and what they term hippies in general, with a passion, full of contempt for anything remotely close to even credit to the Dead for anything, much less musically related. And those into the Dead blindly talk of unfiltered, unhindered creativity that you can't really understand unless you get into it deep enough to truly understand it. I accepted them at a young age because I was really into drugs and drugs and the Dead went hand and hand. There are conspiracies that the CIA was involved in the trafficking of LSD in association with Dead tour for decades, with the death of Jerry Garcia times perfectly with the rise of more pharmaceutical hallucinogenics. I went to my first Dead show in like 1990, with two buddies from high school, both of whom had already graduated. They both had cleared it with their folks; I was still only 17 with one year left and think I mentioned it to my dad the evening before at my sister's softball practice, and he was all bugged up about it, not because he was uptight, because he did far more drugs in his short life than I could hope to touch, but he knew the deal. He knew what was up and shit, and didn't want me doing something retarded like buying up a couple hundred hits of acid to sell back home to avoid having a for-real job.
I can see both sides of the Dead opinion spectrum, probably leaning more towards the hatred than the love, but the truth, like always, is in the grey area in between. I grew up with the influence of redneck hippies who had no pretensions really, more of a Miller High Life/homegrown set than a Newcastle Brown Ale/killer kind bud set. It took a few years of college (okay, a couple weeks) to realize the fucking full of shit suburban fucks who buy into hippie looks and make it embarrassing to have anything to do with anything resembling them. Idealistic chicks driving Subaru stationwagons with VISUALIZE WHIRLED PEAS bumper stickers with their stupid clean-shaven dreadlocked boyfriend in his NORML shirt. But I could still enjoy a Dead show now and then (even getting miracled at a show where everybody I went with didn't get in, got mad stoned and made out with what in hindsight was probably a 14-year-old, and while wandering around completely fucked afterwards trying to find the dudes I came with, realized I was walking fifty feet behind the guy who drove us up there, who was looking for his own ride, but had some shrooms to split with me... perfectly fucked up day), but I couldn't get into that Dead worship bullshit. When Jerry died, man, I didn't really give too much of a fuck.
As for records, Workingman's Dead is probably their best studio album, when Garcia was first exploring his country/bluegrass interests, but they were always more of a live group, being they are the most famous shitty cover band to ever have existed, so Steal Your Face is what I'd consider my favorite, or most personally memorable record. I've probably played Europe '72 a bit more, mostly because it has a version of "Tennessee Jed" which they always played at every live show I ever saw, but Steal Your Face I have associated in my mind of not yet being completely hateful towards hippies and dabbling in hippie vagina crack and laying on a sweaty bed in a shitty apartment with a stoned chick, buzzed on THC together and excited to fuck like fuckers. "Sugaree", "Big River", "U.S. Blues"... I got personal fuck memories to all that shit. It should also be noted that, regardless of how stupid hippies or the Grateful Dead are, if you removed all personal preconceptions from it, the Steal Your Face logo is pretty fucking awesome.
I'm sure there's hardcore Deadheads who have bootleg live shows pressed on vinyl, but that's one of those serious business sub-cultures, where you get into something so heavily it is SERIOUS ASS BUSINESS. No mic dubs but shit straight from the soundboard, and no sharing with you unless you have something to share in return. Man, I've gotten high with dudes like that, with racks and racks of live shows on cassette, pulling out a specific one because "it has the best version of 'Me and My Uncle' you'd ever hear, Jerry was on fire that night man" or some nonsense. The funny thing is, that sub-culture obviously grew with the internet, but then the Grateful Dead shut it down, after decades of letting people tape shows, because they want to slowly release everything as Dick's Picks Volume 329 and on or whatever. The local community radio station has some dudes who have a Dead show on the weekends, and they are all about it, still, even in this age of the crushing corporate marketing of the Grateful Dead. They were never going to perform again, but oh wait, they did for a fucking Barack Obama fundraiser. Fucking bastards.
I will admit to seeing a couple of decent Phil Lesh & Friends shows early on when they did that, but I think part of my enjoyment was he had some hippie dude who looked exactl like Mr. Show's David Cross from a distance who played the pianeys, including a Hammond organ. But once that got popular, the rest of the stupid Dead got involved, chased off most of Phil Lesh's friends, and it was basically the stupid non-Jerry Garcia Dead still.
Honestly, stupid fucking trustafarian hippie types have ruined it so badly for me that it's hard for me to remember the Dead can be non-annoying at times. But on some days - a warm spring Saturday afternoon where there's no obligations except to do serious damage to a cold 12-pack sitting at the picnic table in the backyard, I can drag a speaker out on top of the camper and hook up the turntable and throw on Steal Your Face and still enjoy it. But if someone shows up at the house, I get all self-conscious about it and probably put on a Black Sabbath record or something, just to make sure they know I'm not a pussy.

100 VINYLZ: #98 - Another Sign 12-inch by Schoolly D

(1994, Ruffhouse Records)
Schoolly D is a hip hop living legend. I know the standard rap dork meme is "hip hop's original gangster," but whether or not that is true is unimportant to me. He dropped Saturday Night, where he drew the cover on notebook paper (or at least it looks that way), which is where people got killed on wax for the first time, to paraphrase every rap historian's stupid book ever. But beyond that, he dropped Am I Black Enough For Ya and Smoke Some Kill, both of which took black nationalism to a different level entirely. Shit, Smoke Some Kill is one of my all-time most played tapes ever, a classic from start to stop. Oddly enough, he had a track on there called "No More Rock-n-Roll" where he declares an end to the rock era, of course over top a classic rock guitar sample.
All that history is what led me to buy this "Another Sign" single by Schoolly when he was well past his prime. It was on the same label as Cypress Hill, and produced by Joe "the Butcher" Nicolo, who helped Muggs create that weird rock-n-roll/rap hybrid that helped Cypress Hill hold top spots in the High Times 100 for years. But I think this song is one of the most classic, unheralded rap/rock hybrids songs (aka rack-rop, which is also how Koreans with Down's syndrome say "laptop") to ever be. The beat is laid back as fuck, but the guitar is pure studio electric guitarism filtered heavily through someone who had been digging on the blues lately. And Schoolly's lyrics are beyond revolution, beyond caring. He's given up and doesn't give a fuck anymore, but not in a "I'LL SHOOT ANY MOTHERFUCKER ALIVE" not giving a fuck but more of a "sigh... I guess I'll get drunk tonight and sleep on the couch and maybe tomorrow if I'm lucky I'll die." It's a great song, and not often remembered in the normal hip hop nerd memes regarding Schoolly D, because it came out after Schoolly was considered relevant. I still play it whenever I'm on one of my moody ass fuck-the-world kicks.
I remember watching Space Ghost one night all blazed up and Schoolly D was on that bama. On one hand, shit like that makes you think, "Cool, they got some wild shit up on the TVs nowadays," but on the other more realistic hand it just means you're an old ass washed-up piece of shit that's moved into a more marketable demographic of your life. It's like that cell phone commercial with the dude wearing the Motorhead shirt but talking like a prep school faggot in theater class. There's nothing cool about that commercial, but it does point out to you how uncool you are now, for even sitting around on the couch long enough to see that shit, so you might as well give up and buy the useless shit they're trying to sell to you. What the fuck else are you gonna do until you die? Get drunk and sleep on the couch? Ha! Yeah right, you've got to work in the morning, you fucking square.

100 VINYLZ: #99 - Santo Swings! 2x7-inch by Southern Culture on the Skids

(1996, Estrus Records)
Having grown up in Shitsville, Southern America, afflicted with the genetic shortcomings of those disdainfully referred to as "white trash" (shortcomings include but not are limited to: embracing poverty as nobility, affinity for cars more than homes, a love for alcohols either held in aluminum or cooked up in copper, fried foods especially assorted parts of the chicken, and a hatred of urban things), I have a giant amount of prejudice towards people who seem to have that campy kitschy pseudo-redneck thing going on. And it gets more and more prominent. The spread of Pabst Blue Ribbon beer, as well as the growth of roller derby teams are just two examples of this. I automatically hate both, not that I'm above drinking cheap ass beer or finding some tattooed thick-legged slut hot, but having lived in Richmond, Virginia, in a college environment long enough to see how many people swear off their successful suburban upbringings to slum it up as pseudo-rednecks, I can't trust these things when I see them.
First off, when slumming it up, people either don't give a fuck about what they are pretending to be (which means they don't give a fuck about how I grew up, so I should fight them) or they have chosen, at least in terms of personal image, something less affluent than what they were born into (which is retarded to me, because I have spent a good part of my life trying to escape the retarded lines of thinking I was seemingly poisoned with upon birth).
Of course, this is a cancerous way to think, because just by having a stupid blog, anyone who reads this who feels themself white trash will assume I'm a fake ass because I put words together inside the internets like someone's supposed to give a shit what I think. I can say that I've been to multiple funerals inside junkyards, multiple funerals with confederate flags on the coffin (including one where a good third of the people in attendance were black, and not shocked at all), where "Freebird" was played unironically. Shit, I just had a moment like this the other night, as last week I had two family funerals come up. One was my aunt's boyfriend, who was a truck driver, and his funeral was beautiful. Standing room only in the church I'm sure he only went to twice a year, but the preacher did a good sermon, and we all went graveside, and as is the norm, they opened it up for people to speak on his behalf. That's my favorite local tradition at funerals, because you get to hear the non-preachy shit about how someone was a good ass dude. Anyways, one lady said they always sung some song at the end of the night when they were all drinking and doing karaoke at this bar, a gospel song, but she couldn't sing it. But this old school looking country dude in one of those dress jackets with the leather part at the top like an old bluegrass musician would wear to court with two ladies said, "How about 'I'll Fly Away', will that one work?" And the other lady across the funeral said, "That'll be nice." And the fancy country dude and the two women with him busted it out. And I ain't gonna lie, I cried. Of course, being raised in Shitsville, Southern America, I didn't make a sound and I, in macho mode, wiped my eyes one at a time in a strong sweeping motion, almost like a punch, to show I was in control of my uncontrolled emotions. Well, we (meaning my family and me) were at a cookout the other night, and most of our friends aren't that wild or wacky, but this couple is. But most of the people we know are uptight ass white people, which is why I stay to myself a lot of times, and a couple of them, while bluegrass music was playing on the radio, busted into an oversung rendition of "I'll Fly Away", their little Whole Foods fed lungs working as hard as they could in between sips of $8 a 6-pack beer. (Haha, it's funny how many of the stupid things I said above I was trying to get better about I've still done in this paragraph.) They had no idea how real that song was to me, fresh in my head from seeing old country suave dude sing it at a truck driver's funeral in bumfuck Charlotte County, Virginia. Oh well. Fuck it.
Anyways, Southern Culture on the Skids is popular with the college town fake-ass redneck set, which would automatically seem they would be that way too. And with the overdone hillbilly stereotypes and songs about Little Debbie snack cakes and them throwing fried chicken into the crowd, it's hard to argue there's not a ton of posturing going on. But you know what? I have been able to overlook this because Southern Culture on the Skids has always been this way, for a long ass time now, and it's not like they've gotten rich off it. Maybe their trust fund kids all of them, and instead of having some retarded green building carpentry crew, this is their post-rich family hustle. But I am able to enjoy them.
When my wife (then not my wife) first got pregnant, we hadn't even found a house to live in together yet, and the first thing we did was tag along with my mom to the beach (northern Southerners go to the Outer Banks in North Carolina), and we saw Southern Culture on the Skids play at whatever that gaudy ass club is in Nags Head. It was my wife's first time going to a show sober, and having just quit smoking since she was knocked up, it was interesting. I don't think I even drank to be honest, but that's kind of hard for me to imagine being true. But it was a good show. And then again a few years back, she took me the night before my actual birthday to see them at Starr Hill (R.I.P.) in Charlottesville, and that was a great ass show. When they called for a volunteer to sing along with "Viva Del Santo" my wife tried to push me into the role, being it was natural for me, what with my retarded affection for Mexican wrestling, and actually owning the single, but some fratboy chump did it instead. Which was fine, because he was afraid after the second time he said it, hiding behind his Faggotland Lacrosse baseball hat which he most likely wore in the shower for a week to get that perfect curve to the bill.
Anyways, this double 7-inch is one I keep in good shape, and most likely if I ever get my never-fixed jukebox actually fixed, both singles will go into the mix, being Estrus Records was nice enough to have them be actual 45s with actual big holes. (It is worth noting here that when it comes to good shitty rock-n-roll in cheap vinyl format, Estrus Records was the standard at one point in my life. A lot of punk-ish labels are pretentious beyond their archaic format, but Estrus was always heavily steeped in drunkenness.) They came on colored vinyl as well (one red and one green), and as I've grown and minimized the collections, and been annoyed by others who like Southern Culture on the Skids, this double 7-inch has become my lone survivor of their music. I mean, you get the basic wacky song with old blues/funk chicken picking guitar solo idea they always do, and this one has that all covered in spades.
It's funny, as I try to pretend I'm some well-grown non-piece of shit, I looked up to take the last sip of this bottle of Yuengling, and realized that although I'm typing on a fancy assed new-fangled (but cheapest model available) laptop, I'm playing shitty records in a shitty camper (that some gypsy lady left on my property and may come back to retrieve at any point, which is going to be a tough day since I've trashed it, again due to genetics) looking at a picture of El Santo (which is really just a picture of his son, El Hijo Del Santo, behind a piece of glass, taped together with green tape that barely bends around the front to create a "frame"). So as much as I hate people faking the redneck funk, I'm as fucked as ever. I don't have a working satellite anymore, so I can't watch the Mexican wrestling anymore, but the non-working dish (a small new school one, not one of those old West Virginia state flower ones) is still mounted to my house, holding an empty bird feeder. And it's moments like this where I look around and realize no matter how many steps I've taken to improve my lot in life, I am seemingly as fucked as I was the day my 17-year-old parents popped me out into this world.

100 VINYLZ: #100 - Tattooed Beat Messiah LP by Zodiac Mindwarp & the Love Reaction

(1988, Vertigo Records)
This is a replacement vinyl, as originally I had this on one of many yellow shell Sony 90 minute dubbed tapes I made from my boy Evil Ed back in high school, back when tape dubbing was the RIAA‘s piracy threat of doom. It was always a favorite tape of mine (I think Faster Pussycat’s first self-titled album may have been dubbed on the other side), and while in the college, I saw it one time in the used record store of note in Richmond, which would be Plan 9 in Carytown. (I am sure I will get into a long explanation of that place during this project, but the first entry is not the time for it yet.)
Zodiac Mindwarp, by today’s standards, would be lumped into the “hair metal” movement, which is why I have always hated that hair metal label. As a dude (haha, I said “dude”) who was listening to music back then, it wasn’t as black and white as “heavy metal” and “hair metal”. Lots of music was being made that bridged that gap (Guns’n’Roses most famously, but also shit like Circus of Power, Armored Saint, Accept, L.A. Guns, The Cult, etc.). Most of what I’d consider to be bonafide hair metal was designed for pussies (either girls with actual pussies, because they need music too, or dudes who acted like pussies and worked too hard to fit in, not drinking too much nor smoking homegrown at the local arcade, and just fitting in pussy-getting skills around such delinquent behavior, which is also funny because us delinquents usually got more pussy - or at least more awesome pussy - than those pussy dudes with the watered-down rock-n-roll ever could). Hair metal makes it seem so fucking gay and stupid, and a lot of it was (insert standard VH1 learned music critic meme of “Nirvana changed everything blah blah blah” right here). But there was a lot of shit that was straight up rock-n-roll, fuck the bitches (both figuratively and literally), let’s get fucked up as fuck and fucking fuck, you fucks.
The one and only Zodiac Mindwarp record (that I know of) is this, but even better. A lot of these guys have their mental faculties, and for as crazy as everyone says Axl Rose is, he knows what he’s doing. Zodiac Mindwarp (real name Mark Manning) was a drugged-up space cowboy who could think 3000 words a minute and make them rhyme and have sort of a reason, but like a paranoid schizophrenic handing out homemade Jack Chick-style pamphlets, he didn’t really “know” what he was doing. This, of course, makes this album way better than others like it. He uses big words and combines shit that doesn’t really make sense (for example: Zodiac Mindwarp), but pulls it off, because in his personally warped mindstate, he believed it. You can see those aging fags on VH1 playing washed-up rock star talking about “hair metal” all the time, but those guys were playing a role, waiting for the gimmick to die so they could move on to some other stage of their life. Zodiac Mindwarp was all-in from the get-go (double-hyphenated cliché word score internet Scrabble rules - 153 points!).
For further proof of all this, consult your local library for Fucked By Rock by Mark Manning. My wife got it for me for my birthday because a guy I internet-know who was involved with GNR at times highly do-or-die recommended it to me. And it’s a crazy fucking book, with full insight into an acid casualty rock star two decades behind the well-known wave of hippie fuckers who you’d expect to be acid casualties. Manning was going to be the singer or was the singer or some shit for The Cult at some point, but ruined the gig by being... well, by being himself, so pretentious ass Ian Astbury was the singer instead. If you are a fan of reading books by semi-famous people who tell you how debaucherous their life was (European brothels where underage girls were duct taped into position ass-up for your personal pleasures, for example), then this is a book you probably ought to try and check out.
In the dilapidated camper behind my house where I do most of my compound-related quality lounging, there are three album covers with the albums removed taped up to the walls - The Coup’s 12-inch single cover for “Not Yet Free” (which is a highly-stylized drawing of a woman with her baby in a sling on one shoulder and a machine gun strapped over her other shoulder), the recalled cover of Lynyrd Skynyrd’s Street Survivors with guitarist Steve Gaines wobbly-eyed and engulfed in flames (which became poor taste soon after when he died in a fiery plane crash the band had), and the cover for Tattooed Beat Messiah. It inspires me, like a motherfucker.

100 VINYLZ: The Introduction

My favorite material possession, if you can count it as only one thing, would be my record collection. It is the one thing I have accumulated through the wasteful spending of money that has given me the most joy, and the one thing that if I don’t mess around with for a while, I get all weirded out and need to just hole up with it for a few hours, immersing myself within it’s oddball variety. It has been alphabetized, but within the subset of categories at one point (I think the basic categories were “white people’s music”, “black people’s music sans hip hop”, and “hip hop” in it’s most categorized days), but nowadays is all sorts of hodgepodged and broken into parts. First off, when me and my wife moved in together ten years ago, we combined our records, which was more of a difficult situation for us to accept than us mixing our DNA into a child. Over the years, with there being no real set record playing part of our home, the precise alphabetization has long been lost. I used to have this wood shelf I took out of a rental house I painted years ago that all my records fit in for the most part, with a bit of overflow running into the bottom two rows of a bookshelf from Target. When we moved to this current house like eight years ago, I cut my record collection down from around 3000 to what would fit into the old rental house shelves (spraypainted black with gold trim by me) - roughly 1500 or so. Of course, it has grown since then, but there is no alphabetized nothing about it. At the far right or left ends of the two shelves, you can run into pockets of things still in alphabetical order, that obviously have never been played in five or six years, but for the most part, it’s all fucked. More than half of it is in the house on that shelf, but as I pull things from it, I push what’s left to the far left and right, leaving empty space in the middle, which I refill when too many records are left sitting out by one of the turntables (we have three working ones right now, but have had as many as five at a time in different parts of our compound for this or that purpose) and need to be returned to Raven’s vinyl homeland.
Except I do a lot of quality lounging out in the borrowed camper behind my house (which is where two of the working turntables are located, although one is a tweener, carried back and forth between the house and camper fairly regularly as necessitated by my own personal brand of mad scientifics), so a good amount of records are now out there, including just about all of my 7-inch collection (at least the ones with big holes that would work in the unfixed jukebox doubling as a hangerless coatrack in my unfinished hallway). So my shit is everywhere.
I have always been a budget-minded record collector, which is probably where the $20 record challenge came from. I do not go into a record store and think, “Oh shit, awesome, a $25 record I’ve always wanted.” I think, “Man, this sucks. I’ve always wanted this record and these faggots want $25 for it. I wonder if I can stuff it into my hoodie?” This is difficult, because record collecting is a very well-known faggot science now, and the sharp-faced guys who price records at used record stores are aware of this, and price accordingly. Also, the ebays fucked everything up for everybody, because if some schmuck in Illinois is getting $23 for his old Voivod War and Pain record, every asshole everywhere thinks they deserve the same $23 for their copy. Except that ain’t the way it works, at least not the way I think it should work. I have wasted tax return money once or twice buying things inside the ebays, but I’m too budget conscious, which means I lose most every auction unless it’s to some disreputable fucker from Australia who ends up ripping me off too. Plus, shipping is the jew’s magic touch to the ebays, and that’s where you make, or lose money, depending on your end of the globalized flea market bargain. I am to this day more of a “let me dig through the endless uncategorized crates of dollar records” type of guy than a “let’s dig through this well-labelled section of top quality records”. Music is meant to be used, not accumulated, and I would say a majority of what I still have is here for a reason, meaning it has use at one mood or another to actually be played. I do not deify the records, and through the years have used various methods of marking them as played or most recent. I used to have a roll of like 5000 little alien head stickers that I’d put the ascending number of and slap on an album side when I played it all the way through, and some of my records are peppered with these, like college football helmets. For a brief time, when I had a bunch of my old rapping 12-inch singles in the camper, whenever I played one I would put a silver Sharpie mark on the sleeve, like I was counting days in jail in an old western flick. All sorts of stupid shit like that. These are not keepsakes to sell later. The perfect example of that is the first MF Doom single, which I have on 12-inch, that Mike Dikk and John Dawson told me might be worth some money. I looked it up inside the ebays and it was worth some money. But I didn’t feel like selling it. Since then, it sat in a pile of records one time near where I had a Tupperware cat bowl for water and food in the camper because the cat was in heat but we couldn’t afford to get it fixed so I trapped it in the camper instead so it didn’t annoy us in the main house with it’s incessant cat-slut cooing. It knocked over the water bowl, which dripped under a sideways stack of records, and just a couple of weeks ago I was digging through them, pulled out the MF Doom single, whose sleeve was stuck to like a BDP single or some shit, and I had to rip them apart. The MF Doom sleeve is all mildewy, but the record is finer than fuck. I played it three times that night.
It’s funny too, because my folks had a good record collection (in fact, parts of mine are just sneaky embezzlements on my part when they split up when I was 16 and my dad lived in a trailer too small for too many possessions and my mom could give a fuck about all that fucking music my drunk ass dad always played), so I was always into records. I remember compact discs coming out (I don’t call them “CDs” because CD is a nickname and nicknames are for friends and I’m a giant hipster fag who thinks Mr. Show is hilarious) and some of my boys being all like, “Man, CDs will last forever but records scratch.” Except CDs felt like a transitory thing even then. I mean, yeah, 8-tracks died out, and cassettes I could envision dying out as well, but records had been around for decades. Compact discs were the same shape and idea, just digitized and mysterious, but in an evil way. Like Third World tribal religions are mysterious, but in a fun “shouldn’t kill me but even if it does it’ll be an awesome story” type mysterious. Compact discs had this ominious futuristic soylent green nature to them. I wasn’t down. And to be truthful, until I was 25 (which was 1998), I had stolen more compact discs in two burglaries than I’d ever bought, new or used. I think in ‘98, I used a fake name (C.R. McClellan) to join Columbia House, and that probably put me over the top for buying more than I had stolen, to that point in life.
Now, it’s gotten even worse, with MP3s (I couldn’t remember what that stood for, to further sell the Mr. Show David Cross as Allen Ginsburg character reference) and people downloading shit, CDs became obsolete quicker than fuck, but people became more removed from the music as something in their house. As opposed to a giant collection of records to look at and feel and peruse for whatever info you can, or better yet to cut the stems and seeds out of a half ounce bag, all your music is inside this tiny little robot that can just disappear. Or you can click a couple of buttons and make it all go away. I know dudes with like two and three external hard drives just full of music - a million billion gigs of shit they’ll never have a chance to listen to because they use all their free time acquiring more music. It is the new CD, because people can get it so easily, and now records are more relevant than compact discs. (HA! What’s up now, my boys from high school? I’m talking to you Dave Jenkins.) We are so far removed from our music as a part of our life, and it’s more part of the background clutter. Theme music has been replaced by ringtones... sigh.
For me, each and every record I have has personal experiences attached. How I got it, what happened while it was playing, what it’s been through with me... Shit, my record collection, during extreme bouts of self-created poverty, has suffered a number of genocides, wiping out entire genres or cherry-picking classics that I’ve missed intensely almost immediately after selling and ever since. The current record collection is almost a conglomeration of survivors - those things too important to me or lacking enough value to others to ever be abandoned into another weird fucker’s hands.
Well, what I decided to do was go through what’s left, what I have here and now, on my five acre compound of chaotic, blemished perfection, and compile this list of my 100 Most Valuable to Me Vinyls. It is highly subjective, and I could probably, once done, immediately do it again and it’d be entirely different. (And I do plan on revisiting this list again... in four years. My record collection always fluctuates and is far more important to me than some fake ass rich fucker trying to be my political figurehead, so I imagine this will be a good way for me to occupy myself during Presidential election years - sitting in my dilapidated camper with no TV and no computer, listening to old records.) But this is the list.
I will forewarn you though, I am going to be long-winded and highly detailed to an almost retarded personal extent. There will be no google searching or wikipedia consultations for historical facts behind the records in question. But there will be entirely too much information about myself, almost to the point of this being a memoir. Which is great, because I’d like to remember a bunch of this shit one more time. There will be no download links for you to see what I’m talking about musically, because blip blooping the sound wave patterns into your own personal robot won’t include attachments for the activities connected and the things that make it special to me and probably only me. That is your forewarning. And that is your introduction to my 100 Most Valuable to Me Vinyls for 2008.